Lingering stereotypes: Salience bias in philosophical argument

Fischer, Eugen; Engelhardt, Paul E.

doi:10.1111/mila.12249

Cited by 17 publications

(26 citation statements)

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“…2.1) lead from verbal case descriptions to intuitions about what else is also true of the cases described. One body of work has made a start on developing an epistemological profile for this process, with a view to assessing not only intuitions (Fischer and Engelhardt 2016), but also inferences in verbal reasoning (Fischer and Engelhardt 2017a;2017b;2019a;2019b;. While this research has been directed at other research questions, its findings speak directly to the issue of conceptual control.…”

Section: Salience Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual control: on the feasibility of conceptual engineering

Fischer

2020

Inquiry

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This paper empirically raises and examines the question of 'conceptual control': To what extent are competent thinkers able to reason properly with new senses of words? This question is crucial for conceptual engineering. This prominently discussed philosophical project seeks to improve our representational devices to help us reason better. It frequently involves giving new senses to familiar words, through normative explanations. Such efforts enhance, rather than reduce, our ability to reason properly, only if competent language users are able to abide by the relevant explanations, in language comprehension and verbal reasoning. This paper examines to what extent we have such 'conceptual control' in reasoning with new senses. The paper draws on psycholinguistic findings about polysemy processing to render this question empirically tractable and builds on recent findings from experimental philosophy to address it. The paper identifies a philosophically important gap in thinkers' control over the key process of stereotypical enrichment and discusses how conceptual engineers can use empirical methods to work around this gap in conceptual control. The paper thus empirically demonstrates the urgency of the question of conceptual control and explains how experimental philosophy can empirically address the question, to render conceptual engineering feasible as an ameliorative enterprise.Conceptual engineering, experimental philosophy, polysemy, stereotypes, philosophical methods.

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Section: Salience Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual control: on the feasibility of conceptual engineering

Fischer

2020

Inquiry

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“…2.2) will lead to salience bias and inappropriate inferences that may vitiate philosophical argument-confirming Austin's (1962, p. 63) hunch that 'tampering with words … is always liable to have unforeseen repercussions.' Thus, it has been suggested that arguments from hallucination (e.g., Ayer 1956;Smith 2002) rely on factive inferences that are licensed by the dominant perceptual sense of perception verbs, but not the phenomenal sense intended in the arguments (Fischer and Engelhardt 2019a) and that Chalmers' (1996) zombie argument relies on inferences from his technical use of 'zombie' that are licensed only by the noun's dominant ('Hollywood') sense and are defeated by contextual information essential to the argument (Fischer and Sytsma 2020). 23 At the same time, evidence that the ordinary use of causal attributions is morally laden (e.g., Livengood et al 2017;Livengood and Sytsma 2020), whereas metaphysical argument often intends a purely descriptive use, motivates the question whether common philosophical thought experiments that use morally valenced cases (assassinations, etc.)…”

Section: Directions For Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Default pragmatic inferences, including stereotypical inferences (Levinson 2000), enrich our spontaneous understanding of verbal case descriptions and premises of arguments. These defeasible default inferences shape philosophical thought experiments (Saint-Germier 2019) and arguments couched in natural language (Fischer and Engelhardt 2019a). J. L. Austin (1962) mooted the idea that they sometimes do so not for better but for worse.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Acceptance of such a reconstruction can amount to adoption of a new, more fully spelled out argument, but cannot establish that a particular automatic inference was involved in the original argument.6 To date, evidential experimental philosophy focused on assessing the evidentiary value of intuitive judgments about verbally described cases, mainly in order to evaluate thought experiments employing the 'method of cases'(Machery 2017). Some proponents of the research program have advocated its extension to the assessment of premises (Nado 2016) and inferences(Fischer and Engelhardt 2019a) in philosophical arguments beyond thought experiments.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Inappropriate stereotypical inferences? An adversarial collaboration in experimental ordinary language philosophy

2020

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This paper trials new experimental methods for the analysis of natural language reasoning and the (re)development of critical ordinary language philosophy in the wake of J.L. Austin. Philosophical arguments and thought experiments are strongly shaped by default pragmatic inferences, including stereotypical inferences. Austin suggested that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are at the root of some philosophical paradoxes and problems, and that these can be resolved by exposing those verbal fallacies. This paper builds on recent efforts to empirically document inappropriate stereotypical inferences that may drive philosophical arguments. We demonstrate that previously employed questionnaire-based output measures do not suffice to exclude relevant confounds. We then report an experiment that combines reading time measurements with plausibility ratings. The study seeks to provide evidence of inappropriate stereotypical inferences from appearance verbs that have been suggested to lie at the root of the influential 'argument from illusion'. Our findings support a diagnostic reconstruction of this argument. They provide the missing component for proof of concept for an experimental implementation of critical ordinary language philosophy that is in line with the ambitions of current 'evidential' experimental philosophy.

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“…Furthermore, I contend that similar considerations apply to other cases in which intuitions have been found to influence whether people accept premises of philosophical arguments. For instance, Fischer and Engelhardt (2019) argue that processes of stereotype enrichment also underwrite judgements about crucial premises in the Argument from Hallucination. If these findings are right, then intuition driving this argument would presumably play an epistemically significant role in philosophical inquiry.…”

Section: Rebutting the Orthogonality Claimmentioning

confidence: 99%

No hope for the Irrelevance Claim

Egler

2019

Philos Stud

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Empirical findings about intuitions putatively cast doubt on the traditional methodology of philosophy. Herman Cappelen and Max Deutsch have argued that these methodological concerns are unmotivated as experimental findings about intuitions are irrelevant for assessments of the methodology of philosophy—I dub this the ‘Irrelevance Claim’. In this paper, I first explain that for Cappelen and Deutsch to vindicate the Irrelevance Claim from a forceful objection, their arguments have to establish that intuitions play no epistemically significant role whatsoever in philosophy—call this the ‘Orthogonality Claim’. I then argue that even under a charitable reading of their views Cappelen and Deutsch fail to establish the Orthogonality Claim. Lastly, I discuss empirical evidence that the Orthogonality Claim is false. The arguments in this paper will demonstrate that Cappelen and Deutsch cannot motivate the Irrelevance Claim and that their replies to recent experimental attacks on traditional methodology of philosophy do not succeed.

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Lingering stereotypes: Salience bias in philosophical argument

Cited by 17 publications

References 91 publications

Conceptual control: on the feasibility of conceptual engineering

Conceptual control: on the feasibility of conceptual engineering

Inappropriate stereotypical inferences? An adversarial collaboration in experimental ordinary language philosophy

No hope for the Irrelevance Claim

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